Lewis Hamilton: The Stalled Career of F1's Tiger Woods

When Lewis Hamilton blazed into Formula One back in 2007, it appeared that Grand Prix racing had discovered its next great champion.

Hamilton won four races in his rookie year and narrowly missed out on the championship. By the end of his second season, he had become both the youngest driver (at the age of 23) to win the Formula One world title and the first multiracial driver to do so (Hamilton's father, Anthony, is black and his mother, Carmen, is white.) His precocious talent and crossover appeal earned him comparisons to Tiger Woods and millions of dollars in endorsement deals with Reebok, Tag Heuer and others.

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Driving for Mercedes, Lewis Hamilton hasn't won a race this season.
Getty Images

But five years on, Hamilton's career seems to have stalled. The British driver has never added to his lone championship and has been eclipsed by the sport's newest star, Germany's Sebastian Vettel, winner of the past three world titles. "It's been a checkered career since the world championship and he's going through a bit of a slump," said David Hobbs, a former F1 driver and commentator for NBC Sports. "But I've got faith in him. When it comes to sheer speed, he's still the man."

In an effort to reverse his fortunes, Hamilton switched rides this season, leaving McLaren for a lucrative deal with Mercedes. But as he approaches Sunday's British Grand Prix, the early results have been lackluster.

Despite three podium finishes, Hamilton has yet to win a race and is already off the pace in the world championship. Worse, he has often been unable to match the speed of his less heralded teammate, Germany's Nico Rosberg, who won last month's Monaco Grand Prix and has started three of the seven races from pole position. "I'm not enjoying the car at the moment, I just don't have a very good balance," Hamilton said after a practice session this week. "I don't feel comfortable."

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Hamilton in Montreal earlier this month.
European Pressphoto Agency

In part, Hamilton has been cursed by bad timing, arriving in Formula One the same year as Vettel, who is on pace to obliterate every record in the book. He's also had his share of bad luck. Hamilton could have been crowned world champion on at least three other occasions, including last year, when he started from pole position in seven of the 20 races, but failed to finish five of them due to mechanical failures.

But Hamilton may also have emerged at the worst possible time for a driver whose strengths are raw speed and a rare ability to execute risky passing maneuvers. Just as Hamilton was celebrating his world championship triumph, Formula One's potentates were casting about for new ways to solve the sport's age-old problem of processional races with little passing. F1 instructed PirelliPPAMF0.30% to produce a less durable tire when it replaced Bridgestone as the circuit's official tire supplier in 2011, creating more pit stops and more lead changes.

That same year, F1 tweaked its rule book, permitting the use of a device known as the "drag-reduction system," which produces a sudden speed boost by adjusting the rear wing on a F1 car in much the same way as an airliner adjusts its wing flaps. These innovations have fueled a dramatic rise in the number of passing moves, which climbed from 14.4 per race in 2008 to 57.2 per race last season. But their impact on racers like Hamilton hasn't been quite so positive.

Anthony Davidson, a test driver for Mercedes and a F1 analyst for Sky Sports, says the DRS technology which has made overtaking so much easier means Hamilton's talent for pulling off passing moves in tight spots is less valuable in today's F1, while his ability to extract maximum speed from his car has been rendered obsolete by modern tires, which cannot withstand his throwback racing style.

Whereas the classic approach to Formula One racing calls for drivers to brake gently through the corners of the circuit's winding tracks, rounding the bend in a U-shape and accelerating out of the corner, "Lewis likes to brake extremely late and make more of a V-shape, attacking the apex and almost bringing the car to a stop before accelerating again as fast as possible," said Davidson.

It makes for thrilling viewing to watch Hamilton hurl his car into corners as if it was a go-kart and correct the resulting back-end slide with armloads of oversteer and opposite lock. But it also eats up tires. James Allen, a F1 analyst for the BBC, says Hamilton is still the fastest driver on the circuit, but will struggle to mount a title challenge until he adapts to the sport's current regulations. Or the sport's regulations adapt to Hamilton.

Next year, Formula One will introduce engines to reduce fuel consumption, replacing today's 2.4-liter V8 engines with a 1.6-liter turbocharged V6 that will likely cause cars to slide more than today's machines, especially when exiting corners. "Hamilton needs Mercedes to get the car to a point where he can push it to the absolute limit in order to get the maximum out of it and out of himself," said Allen. "I've got no doubt that in 2014, they've got an opportunity to do that."

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